More answers

Empty

2 years ago

Overall I just wanna understand how in the world Gauss was able to come to this relationship between the elliptic integral and AGM honestly haha. The AGM basically is the closed form of an elliptic integral it seems, which I am shocked no one has mentioned this powerful function before.

Well I just worked it out, but it just seems like a lot of terrible algebra sadly! @amoodarya
I guess I would like to see some sort of motivation for why there is any relationship between repeating this process:
\[a_{n+1} = \frac{a_n+b_n}{2}\]\[b_{n+1}=\sqrt{a_nb_n}\] and the integral in a way.
How did Gauss know to look here or think this? I can follow through the algebra to show that it's true, but I want to know how ellipses and these averages are related, this seems very strange and fascinating!

Empty

2 years ago

It appears as if someone has explained it here, http://paramanands.blogspot.com/2009/08/arithmetic-geometric-mean-of-gauss.html#.VZ0JZPm6fIU
I can't seem to follow his reasoning on my own, if anyone wants to try to understand this article with me step by step, speak up! Otherwise I'll just sorta take a break from this haha. I don't even know where elliptic integrals really come from other than in calculating arc length or why they are important at all.